3. What’s changed

Most of the changes are compatible with Release 14, the previous release. There are a few commands, however, where new options or parameters have been inserted into the existing lists. These may cause problems in statements where option or parameter names have been omitted or abbreviated (see Section 1.7.1 of Part 1 of the Guide to the GenStat Command Language for details). To avoid any difficulty, the name of the option/parameter after the new option/parameter should be given explicitly, and not abbreviated to fewer than four characters.

Any command, where changes in Release 15 may cause incompatibilities in existing programs, is marked in Sections 3.1 and 3.2 by the symbol †. The full details are given in Section 3.4.

Directives

†AKEEP is now able to save variance-covariance matrices for covariate regression coefficients, and RTERM can save appropriate strata for assessing block terms.

DEVICE can set the resolution of hard-copy devices.

†DKEEP can now save the lower and upper bounds for the z-axis..

FOR now provides more convenient and efficient ways of specifying an index that changes in equal increments.

FSIMILARITY now allows rectangular (between-group) similarity matrices to be printed.

GET can obtain the name of the working directory. It can also get an integer that will be unique within the current job to use, for example, to define suitable names for temporary files.

OPEN can specify custom content for the header of an HTML document.

RCYCLE can set step lengths for FITCURVE.

†RKEEP can now save the fitted model, an indicator showing its type (regression, standard curve etc.) and an indicator to show whether or not a conatant term was included.

SET now provides more flexible ways of setting default seeds to be used to generate random numbers in the various areas of GenStat. It can also set the working directory, and increase the amount of internal data space.

SETCALCULATE now enables you to control whether to substitute dummies within pointers in the expression; it also allows you to suppress the warning messages that are given when data structures in the expression have no values.

SETRELATE now enables you to control whether to substitute dummies within within LEFT and RIGHT pointers.

TERMS now allows a variate of ridge values to be supplied, one for each diagonal element of the sums-of-squares-and-products matrix; it can also save the row labels of the sum-of-squares-and-products matrix.

3.2 Procedures

†ADSPREADSHEET can now colour the cells of the spreadsheet according to levels of the design factors, and can save the spreadsheet as an Excel file.

†APERMTEST can now plot the statistics obtained from the permutations, and can save the probabilities and critical values obtained from the permutations.

†AYPARALLEL now allows covariates to be included in the analysis.

DIALLEL can now produce the Griffing analysis of variance.

†HGKEEP has a new option IGNOREFAILURE that allows you to save information even if the fitting of the HGLM failed to converge.

HGPREDICT now provides a clearer description of the predictions.

†MAANOVA now allows covariates to be included in the analysis.

†QIBDPROBABILITIES can now calculate probabilities for backcross inbred lines.

†QLDDECAY now uses regression to speed up the calculations, and displays quantile regression lines to help interpretation.

†QMATCH now allows you to specify an explicit set of genotypes or markers to remove.

†QMESTIMATE has improved output.

†QMKDIAGNOSTICS can now save details of the genotypes and markers that have problems.

†QSASSOCIATION provides a new fast method, as an alternative to the exact method.

†QSESTIMATE has improved output.

†QSIMULATE can now simulate backcross inbred lines.

†QUANTILE can now form population quantiles instead of sample quantiles.

†RLFUNCTIONAL has been extended to provide plots, and many additional methods.

RQUADRATIC can now save predictions, and plot the fitted quadratic surface.

RSPREADSHEET can now save the spreadsheet as an Excel file.

RYPARALLEL now allows a symmetric matrix of weights to be specified, for generalized least squares.

TABSORT now allows you to keep the levels of some of the classifying factors of the tables in their original order.

T%CONTROL allows percentages to be calculated of the means of several control levels.

UNSTACK now allows has a new option MVINCLUDE, to control whether to include null levels or data sets.

†VPLOT has a new option RMETHOD (as in VKEEP) to specify which random terms to use when calculating the residuals.

†VTCOMPARISONS can now make comparisons for every level of a groups factor.

APERMTEST procedureoption PLOT inserted before NTIMES; SAVE parameter has now become an option.

AYPARALLEL procedureoption COVARIATE inserted before FACTORIAL.

DKEEP directiveoptions YLOWER and YUPPER moved to come after XUPPER, and new options ZLOWER and ZUPPER inserted between YUPPER and FILE. (This to make the ordering of the X, Y and Z options match that elsewhere; see e.g. D3GRAPH.)